The product addresses demanding ATE and OEM systems applications in semiconductors, military electronics, physics, astronomy, avionics, and a variety of other disciplines, as well as the disk drive head and media testing applications.

The waveform digitizer ADC 6000 series modules feature Keysight A/D converters with sampling rates up to 40 GSa/s and analog bandwidth up to 13 GHz. ADC 6000 with up-to 128 GBytes of acquisition memory delivers the longest waveform capture time window available in a high bandwidth analog to digital converter instrument.

A Software Development Kit is supplied to control the instrument and to integrate the ADC 6000 into an existing AXIe measurement system. Guzik also supplies Signal Display soft front panel graphical interface application for signal capturing and visualization.

The block diagram below shows the main components of ADC 6000 in an AXIe system in four-channel configuration:

Acquisition System

At the heart of the ADC 6000 Digitizer Modules are state of the art high-speed real-time analog to digital converter ASICs supplied by Keysight Technologies, which provide high speed waveform capture. The patented2 Guzik digital hardware-accelerated frequency response equalization further improves the signal fidelity and effective number of bits.

At the maximum sampling rate of 40 GSa/s (25 psec per point), the ADC 6000 can capture up to 3.2 seconds of a real-time waveform into its ultra-long acquisition memory –
128 GBytes for single channel configuration.

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2 U.S. Patent 7,408,495

Trigger

The ADC 6000 features a digital processing trigger. This feature makes use of the real-time hardware waveform processing capability and allows you to define trigger parameters based on the actual digital waveform data. This trigger is available on any input channel. In addition one of two external trigger/gate source inputs is provided. Trigger conditions are set using the Signal Display software tool or from your application via SDK.

External Clock and I/O

One 10 MHz input and one 50MHz reference clock input. One 50MHz reference clock output from the digitizer is available to allow precise time base synchronization with more than one digitizer, oscilloscope, RF instruments or logic analyzers. Optionally a 1GHz reference clock connection can be made available instead of the internal ADC clock, by configuring the SPARE connector on the front panel as an input.

Several test outputs are available for custom application support and system integration.

ADC 6000 provides a programmable calibrator output with a variety of test signals. The calibrator could be connected to any input channel and run an automatic calibration routine to ensure accurate operation of the instrument. The calibrator feature is a special-configuration. Please contact Guzik Technical Enterprises for more information.

PCI Express Host Computer Interface

The ADC 6000 provides PCI Express Gen 2 x4 interface to the AXIe backplane. The PCI Express bridge card installs into the host computer, and a standard PCI Express x8 cable connects the AXIe chassis to the host computer. High speed waveform transfer with sustained data rates up to 1.6 GByte/sec is possible from this port back to the host computer.

Processing Overview and Capabilities

FPGA-based Processing

Inside the ADC 6000 are four Altera StratixTM IV FPGA’s. These core processing elements combined with Guzik’s implementation of customer-specified measurement algorithms provide end users with a truly tailored measurement solution where speed and throughput count.

The FPGA-based processor combined with Guzik’s custom engineering capabilities provides you with the possibility to perform digital signal processing directly in ADC 6000 prior to sending waveform data out to computer. Many applications may require only processed results to be sent to the host computer rather than raw waveform data. Guzik can work directly with customers to implement custom processing capabilities drawing from years of experience in waveform analysis. Choice of firmware options includes channel equalization, filtering, multi-segment time-tagged acquisition, Digital Down Conversion (DDC), Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT), min/max, real-time averaging, and parameter calculations among others are all available along with application-specific requests. Guzik can provide custom services after a technical consultation regarding the specific application and required processing.

Multi segment acquisitions in the Guzik digitizers use a circular acquisition buffer with minimum inter-segment dead-time of 300ns. This allows, for example, to capture up to 64 million repetitive signals with relatively large repetition intervals and better utilize the already large acquisition memory by discarding dead-time in between signals. Down to femtosecond resolution time-tagging allows to know the precise time between each captured waveform segment. Please refer to GSA SDK User’s Guide section 5.1.2 Acquisition Format Specification

ADC_BB

(Baseband Acceleration)

This option allows to modify the internal digital FIR filter amplitude and phase response for the digitizer input channel. Additional frequency response amplitude and phase corrections can be added to compensate for the signal path external to the digitizer input channel. If the bandwidth of signal is smaller than the digitizer analog bandwidth, the baseband digital filter cutoff can be reduced before decimation to increase ENOB and reduce data amount needed to be transferred to the PC for post processing. Please refer to GSA SDK User’s Guide section 5.1.10 Data Sampling Rate Control and 5.1.18 External Filter Correction

ADC_BBRT1

(Real-Time 10 GSa/s Baseband Filtering)

To increase acquisition time for longer signals, which have smaller analog bandwidth than the digitizer, the Real-time 10 GSa/s baseband digital filtering and decimation option can be used to reduce acquisition data and increase ENOB before storing it to the memory. This option enables triggered streaming and recording of up to aggregated 1.25 GSa/s or 500MHz of baseband with the ADC6044 across all channels together with the segmented memory option. Please refer to GSA SDK User’s Guide section 5.7 Performing Data Streaming

ADC_DDC

(Digital Down Converting)

In Guzik digitizers the Digital Down Conversion DDC is implemented using FPGAs. The data from ADC is transferred to the memory and from memory through digital equalizer to DDC. The down conversion is implemented by two multipliers with Sin/Cos LO signals. Down converted signals are connected through LPF/decimator to I/Q memory and transferred to PC. Keysight 89600 VSA software can be used to tune each digitizer channel center frequency independently and can perform final processing and measurements related to particular transmission standard for measurement channels simultaneously. This method significantly reduces the amount of data transferred to PC and in return increases measurement speeds. Please refer to GSA SDK User’s Guide section 5.8 Performing Digital Down Conversion

ADC_DDCRT1

(Real-Time 10 GSa/s Digital Down Converting)

The Real-Time 10 GSa/s Digital Down Conversion option allows to perform the down conversion in real-time in the ADC6044 digitizer FPGAs. Real-time IF Magnitude triggering can be used to decide if data is to be stored to the digitizer I/Q memory or not. This allows to capture and store only signals of interest within the DDC span and reduces the data amount needed to be transferred to the PC for post processing. Keysight 89600 VSA software can be used to tune each digitizer channel center frequency independently and can perform final processing and measurements related to particular transmission standard for measurement channels simultaneously. Please refer to GSA SDK User’s Guide section 5.9 Performing Digital Down Conversion in Real Time

ADC_AVG

(High Speed Deep Averaging)

Averaging for noise reduction is used in measurements when high dynamic range is required. Averaging is done in real-time in FPGAs thousands of times faster compared to other methods. With the 40-bit 640K internal accumulator the accuracy of measurements is greatly increased by allowing up-to 4 billion averaged waveforms. This allows viewing side bands spectral regrowth and other repetitive signals previously hidden in the noise. Please refer to GSA SDK User’s Guide section 5.6 Performing Real Time Accumulation Measurement

Segmented averaging mode further advances the measurement flexibility by utilizing groups of data of interest into segments. Each segment may either have its own trigger event programmed or just suspend the data accumulation process for specified period of time. Please refer to GSA SDK User’s Guide section 5.6 Performing Real Time Accumulation Measurement

ADC_M128

(128 GByte Acquisition Memory Option)

Capture the longest time spans at full sample rate with an acquisition memory upgrade to 128 GByte. Longer time capture at full sample rate provides superior acquisitions to hunt down those difficult to find problems in applications with mixed analog and digital signals, serial busses, or various communication signals. Please refer to GSA SDK User’s Guide section 4.4.3.1 Input Resources Configuration

ADC_SYNC1

(Multi-Module Synchronization Capability)

Multi-module synchronization capability, allows to increase the total number of digitizer channels by combining multiple modules into one instrument. The new option enables multichannel phase coherent time-tagged input channels to be triggered from common source or independently. Synchronization is performed during digitizer initialization and channel-to-channel skew is restored between instrument channels. The digitizers can be setup to follow an external 10 MHz or 50 MHz time base without uncertainty, which is critical for ATE and OEM systems application. Please refer to GSA SDK User’s Guide section 4.5 Synchronization of Several Digitizers and 5.1.17 Synchronous Acquisition

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3 U.S. Patent 7,408,495

GPU-based Processing

General-purpose computation on graphic hardware allows developers to reuse the computational algorithms available for GPU or develop their own algorithms on CUDA C or OpenCL. ADC 6000 is optionally shipped with NVidia® GeForce GTX 7704 GPU. It is possible to use any NVidia® GPU with computing capability 2.0 or higher, if its power requirements are satisfied by the host computer power supply.

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4 Current configuration. More powerful GPU cards may be shipped in the future

CPU-based Processing

In addition to FPGA-based and GPU-based computation, customers have an option to perform signal processing using a computer CPU. Multi-core processing libraries, such as OpenMP, allow utilizing full power of modern 12-core CPU computers. Once more powerful computers with additional cores are released, you can upgrade your computer keeping your existing ADC 6000 Digitizer Module.

Ultra-fast GPU-based FFT Measurements5

ADC 6000 performs frequency domain analysis using the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) performed on GPU. Single NVIDIA® Tesla GPU card performs FFT calculations at a 2.5 GSa/s processing speed. This means, for example, that if you collect data at 10 GSa/s for 100 µs, process in 400 µs, you will get the full signal spectrum up to 5 GHz with resolution bandwidth 10 kHz – 500,000 spectral lines – in less than 0.5 ms.

ADC 6000 Modules Designed for AXIe-1 Standard

The 1U AXIe ADC 6000 Digitizer Modules install into an industry standard AXIe-1 chassis together with other instruments, such as Keysight M8190A 12 GSa/s, M8195A 65GSa/s Arbitrary Waveform Generator, and other AXIe-0 or AXIe-1 modular instruments.

Signal Connection and Probing

For applications that require single ended or differential probing, Guzik recommends the Keysight InfiniiMax series of probing tools for use with the ADC 6000 digitizer Modules. Detailed selection information can be found at the following link: http://www.keysight.com/find/probes document 5968-7141EN. A wide variety of probe solutions up to 13 GHz in bandwidth can be purchased directly from Keysight.

The Keysight InfiniiMax Series6 features a variety of probe amplifier and body styles.

The interface to the ADC 6000’s input connector is the Keysight N1022B Probe Adapter, the 1143A Probe Offset Control and Power Module with an additional ruggedized 3.5 mm to SMA cable pictured below.

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6 Keysight and InfiniiMax are registered trademarks of Keysight, Inc.

GSA Toolkit Software

Guzik provides a GSA Toolkit to control the ADC 6000 Digitizer Modules, which includes two software components: